An Essential Guide To Legal Free Downloads

angruss

angruss

CAGiversary!
So, You have a bit of bandwidth eating a hole in your pocket, eh? You wanna download stuff and don't fancy paying? You respect copyright law? Good. I'm gonna tell you the basics of free downloads in a variety of topics, as well as the basic XBLA/PSN/Steam stuff that most people know about, so you don't have to repost old news.

Music - Ah, the files that made "download" synonymous with "thief" from 1999 to 2004. Luckily, we're not looking for Metallica, we're looking for smaller bands that give it out free just so you'll remember their names. The best service by far for this is Jamendo. The music here is mostly Creative Commons, but some is under other licenses.



Angruss recommends: Josh Woodward, Brad Sucks, Sean Fournier.

Also check Amazon MP3 for some various samplers that include more well known artists.


Angruss recommends: Public Enemy, Blondie, Primus.

Recommended by list users:
Band Camp - delsus09
Bandcamp also has a lot of free music (including "pay-what-you-want" stuff). One artist I like is Sinitus Tempo. Check out his Peaceland album.
There's also been some free game soundtracks; the GameCube Hobbit game soundtrack for one, & some PacMan stuff. - delsus09

Books - Books are great to download because of how amazingly small they are. 500 pages books can take up a few megabytes. Thanks to public domain laws, some of your favorites are available on a little site called Project Gutenberg.


Also check out these free Kindle books (A lot of overlap with Gutenberg) that can be read with your iOS, Android, Kindle, or PC.

Angruss recommends: Alice In Wonderland, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Hamlet.

List users recommend:
BookOS (Mobile) - Delsus09
I thought I'd come back & bring a site called BookOS your attention. It's a site similar to Project Gutenberg, which distributes out books, magazines, & other forms of text-based media in various formats (PDFs, fd2, & etc.) for free. They brought in about 50K items & took out about 7k items per month in their first three months of activity, so you can only imagine what they have going now; over a million books, ready for download. The language of the content can vary (I got the Japanese version of one of Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban, as an example, freakin' sweet!) but for the most part, it's all in English, & if a book isn't, it's pretty easy to see as such through the book's title language.

Movies -Fun fact: everytime you download Night Of The Living Dead free/legally, George Romero grows an ounce of hope for the future of film and John Russo cries and asks for money.

Archive.org Movies

Angruss recommends: Night Of The Living Dead, The Charlie Chaplin Films, The Brain That Wouldn't Die.

Also check out the films made with Blender. Big Buck Bunny is really quite good.

Software

Aviria Anti-Virus - One of the best free Anti-virus out there.


Piriform CCleaner and Defraggler - The cleanest your computer will ever be. Defraggler goes deeper than Windows Defrag and moves system files safely, speeding your bootup. CCleaner clears out bad registry values and cookies like it's nobody's business.


Sourceforge - If you need a piece of software, it's always wise to do a search here first. They have something for everyone, and if it's not free here, it won't be free anywhere.


Angruss recommends: Open Office, GIMP, Audacity.

Recommended by list users:
SuperAntiSpyware - Recommendation by MetalSlugger
Malware Bytes - Recommendation by canvasch



Games - The main meat of this site, there's a pretty hefty list of free PC games over in the PC Gaming section that you can peruse. The most important outside links I can give though, are to Digipen and Wikipedia.

Wikipedia - The list of Open Source games has a fair selection of the best free stuff on the net.


Angruss recommends: Neverball, Super Tux.

Digipen - Narbacular Drop and Tag are famous the world around for inspiring the Portal series. Also notable is Nitronic Rush, which gets a fair bit of attention for how AWESOMELY FUN it is.


Angruss recommends: Tag, Nitronic Rush.


Also, if you're a fan of Sonic The Hedgehog, go play Sonic Robo Blast 2. It's just a fan game, but it's arguably the best sonic since Sonic Adventure.


Now, on to that stuff that gets posted here all the time.

Steam
Portal: The First Slice (Demo, but a significant amount of play time anyway.)
Team Fortress 2
Microsoft Flight
Metro 2033 (with facebook code)
Codename Gordon
Mightier
Peggle Nights
Sam and Max Ep. 104
Alien Swarm
Trackmania Nations Forever
More here...

XBLA
Harms Way
Doritos Crash Course
Aegis Wing
Crimson Alliance (NOT FREE)
Happy Wars (Gold Only)

Well, that's the list so far, send me all your suggestions for additions (either cool places to get stuff or stuff that's reposted incessantly that I can add to the bottom section.)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
[quote name='silverrat23']Portal: The First Slice is a demo.
Aegis Wing is also free from a US 360 account[/QUOTE]
Fixed.
 
More free Steam games:

Codename Gordon
Mightier
Peggle Nights
Sam and Max Ep. 104

I'm on mobile right now but I can make further suggestions (with links) when I get home.
 
List of all free Steam games: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=851573

List of free DRM-free GOG games (choose "Filter: free" on the right side): http://www.gog.com/catalogue

List of almost 10,000 freeware PC games (maintained by Megazell): http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=244468

All public domain and free books via Kindle (nearly half a million free documents in all languages): http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/b/ref=amb_link_355831402_49?ie=UTF8&node=154606011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=1QZDWHJPCC6R27FC7XDY&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1449209742&pf_rd_i=1286228011#/ref=sr_st?qid=1356983988&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A!133141011%2Cn%3A154606011&sort=price

Kindle for PC: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_w8_ln_ar?docId=1000426311
 
Updated with info from above posts. Thanks to Mugatu, Blade, Theindianbeast, canvasch, MetalSlugger, and Silverrat23. Also updated formatting to be easier to read.

I'm hesitant to do Wikifying quite yet, once the thread gets going (Probably around 10 pages) I'll do it.

If the post gets too long, it will likely undergo a big formatting change to split into something more dynamic (akin to Megazell's PC game thread).
 
Bandcamp also has a lot of free music (including "pay-what-you-want" stuff). One artist I like is Sinitus Tempo. Check out his Peaceland album.
There's also been some free game soundtracks; the GameCube Hobbit game soundtrack for one, & some PacMan stuff. Not everything is free, but that's where you'll find a lot of the good free music on the web. I tried out Jamendo for a little bit, but I don't like it much at all.
 
A little correction, Happy Wars is not Multiplayer Only it has a small single player portion. And it's available for free only to Xbox Live Gold Members...
 
My bad on not giving you the initial link. I'm liking what you're doing so far though, Angruss.

(NOTE: Before I continue on ahead, I'm not sure about the legality of the site, but I've seen no major signs of illegality, & considering they have a .org site domain, Firefox add-on for a search-bar, a mobile site, &, I would suspect that they're clean. I think they're based in Russia, though...or have a primarily Russian team, but their site doesn't have a .ru-domain.)


I thought I'd come back & bring a site called BookOS your attention. It's a site similar to Project Gutenberg, which distributes out books, magazines, & other forms of text-based media in various formats (PDFs, fd2, & etc.) for free. They brought in about 50K items & took out about 7k items per month in their first three months of activity, so you can only imagine what they have going now; over a million books, ready for download. The language of the content can vary (I got the Japanese version of one of Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban, as an example, freakin' sweet!) but for the most part, it's all in English, & if a book isn't, it's pretty easy to see as such through the book's title language.

They have a regular .org site & a m. site as well, along with a Firefox book search engine, which can make search for something very helpful.

Links:

Website: http://bookos.org/
Mobile site: http://m.bookos.org
BookOS Help page: http://bookos.org/help.php

Have fun CAGs, & good luck with the thread, Angruss.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
BookOS seems very similar to Scribd, but without all the lame social networking stuff that turned me off of Scribd.

Thank you, delsus09, for your continued support of this thread.
 
[quote name='angruss']BookOS seems very similar to Scribd, but without all the lame social networking stuff that turned me off of Scribd.

Thank you, delsus09, for your continued support of this thread.[/QUOTE]

Mmm, it's my pleasure to contribute to your thread. I also agree that by cutting out the pointless social networking & getting the content to you for free without having to sign up or go through any ads is great; it's a lot like Project Gutenberg in that sense, but they have some more recent stuff, & many more other-region texts too
 
[quote name='delsus09']Mmm, it's my pleasure to contribute to your thread. I also agree that by cutting out the pointless social networking & getting the content to you for free without having to sign up or go through any ads is great; it's a lot like Project Gutenberg in that sense, but they have some more recent stuff, & many more other-region texts too[/QUOTE]

I like the variety of language options. It seems Gutenberg just likes doing English and original language, and once in a while French. Which, while nice for English speakers, is very limiting in a world where communication is received across the world faster than it usually can be heard across the room.
 
[quote name='angruss']I like the variety of language options. It seems Gutenberg just likes doing English and original language, and once in a while French. Which, while nice for English speakers, is very limiting in a world where communication is received across the world faster than it usually can be heard across the room.[/QUOTE]

Mmm; speaking of languages & communication, while there were a few books on Japanese on BookOS, I don't know of any specific books or book sites that can assist me with said language. There's a Japanese one "Aozora Bunko/青空　文庫/Blue Sky Library, which is basically the Japanese version of P-Gutenberg, but that is for native/fluent speakers. Do you have any books &/or sites that may be able to assist me with my Japanese studies?
 
[quote name='canvasch']@MetalSlugger



I've used super anti spyware and i've gotta tell you, the best malware program out there is Malware Bytes.



www.malwarebytes.org [/QUOTE]


I've had both running on my PC for years and MalwareBytes has only ever caught one thing during a full scan whereas SAS catches tracking cookies and malware almost every scan. YMMV but MB has prooven useless to me.
 
Made the Software section more dynamic by adding direct links to the Sourceforge recommendations.
 
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